Fight night! Time for—can you believe it?—the ninth Republican debate, and finally, there are only six guys in the ring. Whatever predictable opening remarks this gang may have prepared have been tossed into the dustbin of history. With the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday, the very first question unsurprisingly regards his successor, and for once these cats-in-a-sack exhibit a rare moment of unanimity. Everybody thinks Scalia was swell, and nobody, but nobody, wants President Obama to appoint the new justice, with Donald Trump, in his usual subtle fashion, shrieking, “Delay! Delay! Delay!”

But this rare example of harmony rapidly vanishes. In front of a red backdrop dotted with pink CBS eyes (in honor of Valentine’s Day?), and after a few rather strange blasts—Marco Rubio says that the bravest thing he ever did is to vote against Obama’s plan to use force in Syria, and John Kasich explains what he means when he says he wants to punch Russia in the nose—Jeb Bush and Donald Trump have a delicious screaming fight over Bush family values.

The referee—I mean the moderator—sets it off by asking Trump if he stands by his opinion, proffered in 2008, that George W. Bush should have been impeached. “The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump replies. “George Bush made mistakes, and that one was a beauty! They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction!” (Wait, has Fashion Week exhaustion addled my brain? I am agreeing with Donald Trump!)

“My brother was attacked, so I get to respond!” a feisty Bush, who bears scant resemblance to the broken-toy Bush of previous debates, declares. “I am sick and tired of him going after my family. My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind. While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I’m proud of what he did!” And then he adds that Trump even “had the gall to go after my mother.” Trump snorts that bro didn’t keep us safe, that the World Trade Center came down under his watch, and that, as for Mommy, maybe she should be running instead of sonny boy.

All of this is delivered at top volume, from beet-red faces, prompting Kasich, whose demeanor seems to have been lifted from Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, to say, “I gotta tell you, this is just crazy, this is just nuts, jeezo man!” He explains that, well, we thought there were WMDs, we got ourselves drawn into a civil war, and well, um, jeezo, if there weren’t WMDs, we never should have gone there.

Then Rubio, fresh from his humiliation at the hammy hands of the now departed Chris Christie during the last debate, pipes up that he thanks God all the time that on 9/11 it was George Bush in the White House and not Al Gore, because he kept us safe. This has the effect of making Trump even more apoplectic: “How did he keep us safe? I lost hundreds of friends!” (Oh, no, I am agreeing with him again! I am going to kill myself.)

The moderator attempts to put an end to this battle royale, but it only has the effect of shifting the combatants. Now Ted Cruz decides to attack Rubio on immigration: “If you look at the folks on this stage, I stood and led the fight to defeat the Rubio-Schumer amnesty plan,” he says, and then, not for the first time tonight, he ties himself to the crowded coattails of Ronald Reagan. “That moment was what Reagan would call a time for choosing.”

Rubio responds in a fury: “Cruz wanted to double the number of green cards!” Cruz chastises Rubio for going on Univision and saying he would not rescind President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office, and Rubio responds, “How do you even know what I said on Univision? You don’t speak Spanish!”

And then Cruz does actually speak Spanish, or a burst of something that could be Spanish. Rubio, in English, calls him a liar: “He’s lying about all sorts of things. But now he makes things up!” Cruz says that is absolutely false! Bush interrupts, saying that he feels like Christie, by which he is not referring to their twin abysmal delegate counts, and that he should be president because these two are just typical Washington insiders, arguing about arcane legislation that didn’t pass. He also puts forth the radical notion that most people who come here illegally need work and are not rapists, like you-know-who said.

“I don’t often agree with Marco and Ted,” you-know-who replies. “The weakest person is Jeb Bush; he is so weak it’s laughable and everybody knows it.” And then Bush shouts (isn’t this fun?) that it is weak to denigrate women, the disabled, and John McCain. And here comes Daddy Kasich, scolding that if everybody keeps being so negative, we are handing this election to Hillary Clinton!

You might think that this would have had the effect of calming everyone down, but you would be wrong. Cruz decides to jump down Trump’s throat, opining that “you shouldn’t be flexible on core values” and that Trump is very pro-choice. Trump yells, “You are the single biggest liar! This guy will say anything, nasty guy!” Cruz pulls the Planned Parenthood card out of his back pocket and says Trump supports PP! And Trump responds that, except for abortions, the organization “does some wonderful things when it comes to women’s health.”

This school-yard taunting, with its nonstop chants of “Liar! Liar!” hurling in all directions, has pretty much left out our friend Ben Carson, who has been ambling in and out of the debate like an exhausted doctor who has been on call for 36 hours. “Free college is a nonstarter,” he says, and he is bringing this up because . . .why? Does he think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee? “We are on the verge of economic collapse!” Then he says the whole problem in this country is “not the evil rich people, it’s the irresponsible evil government.”

To which evil, irresponsible me, exhausted from what feels like two hours in a boxing ring with six replicas of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, staggers out of the TV room, which in my house is also the kitchen, dining room, library, and office, and wonders if that red backdrop was meant to conceal all the blood on the walls.